Pickin' on Your Baby. I'll See You in My Dreams. Sobbin' Hearted Blues. Cold in Hand Blues. You've Been a Good Ole Wagon. Track Listing - Disc 2. The St. Louis Blues. Reckless Blues. Bye and Bye. Play Me Slow. Alabamy Bound. Armstrong was touring Africa in October, ; this program was taped in color at some earlier date. Recording of a concert during Armstrong's trip to Africa sponsored by the U. State Department. Recordings are a with a largely French big band.

Solos were supposedly overdubbed later. Jewel Brown replaced Velma Middleton as featured vocalist with the band in April. Middleton suffered a stroke while on tour with the band in Africa and passed away after a brief hospitalization. Glaser ordered the band to leave her in Africa, causing much consternation amongst the All Stars.

Bigard was deeply insulted and would leave the group shortly thereafter. Call it what you will -- a jazz operetta or prototypical concept album -- it is a musical epic dedicated to the impact and influence of Louis Armstrong, not just as a musician, but as a twentieth century cultural icon. Far-reaching in depth, and impressively mature decades later. The penultimate session for The Real Ambassadors album. Performance for an audience of soldiers taped by a German camera team. Ethel Waters made an impassioned dressing-room speech about the moral imperative to carry the music to those who needed it most.

Nobody else bailed. Waters schooled Henderson in Harlem stride piano by making him listen to the piano rolls of James P. They played Oklahoma towns like Muskogee and Ardmore, in the wake of the Tulsa Race Riot, when whites had savaged a prosperous black community.

It was missionary work. Waters wore a blue pan velvet gown and gold dangling earrings. She smiled reassuringly when she sang her hit songs. Fletcher kept the band from playing too hot, and backed the comedy skits on piano. He was six-foot-two, with hair cropped close to his head.

He had never had any burning urge to lead a band, it had just happened. They played piney-woods towns in Arkansas where survivors of the Elaine massacre might have fled. They played Paris, Texas, which was christened by the Chicago Defender as the birthplace of burning black people at the stake, most recently the Arthur brothers, one of whom had been a war veteran. But the Black Swan group was treated amicably, and the audience included white people. In Waco, the troupe performed within blocks of the infamous public square where a crowd of 15, whites had cheered in as a mentally deficient Negro boy was tortured and burned alive, his torso dragged through the streets.

They were invited to play for a local radio station, and Fletcher became possibly the first black bandleader to broadcast on radio. He tried to hire a young local, Louis Armstrong, on the spot, but Armstrong would not leave his drummer.

They would meet again soon. Waters later claimed that in Macon, Georgia, local whites threw the body of a lynched boy into the theater lobby shortly before her performance was to start, but this is inaccurate. A body was thrown into the lobby of the Douglass Theater some months after Black Swan passed through. They moved on through Dixie, and scalloped up the Eastern seaboard home to Harlem, and the Black Swan players disbanded by the end of the summer of Pace Phonograph was being muscled out of the competition by bigger white-controlled recording companies, and by the mass production of radios.

Tying it all together was an infectious charisma that propelled him to popular stardom in a new era of sound film and electronic communication. Born in , his life paralleled many of the twists and turns of the middle century. Ellsworth , Aug 5, Artie Shaw! I always enjoyed Glenn Miller's wartime broadcasts. I first heard them on a collection called "The Lost Broadcasts" but I believe they are available on a number of different CDs.

Frame , Aug 8, You must log in or sign up to reply here. Show Ignored Content. Share This Page. Back O' Town Blues. Save It, Pretty Mama.

James Infirmary. Jack Armstrong Blues. Rockin' Chair. Hoagy Carmichael.